Affiliate program as the most effective promotion tool on the example of Ivideon

Do not worry about people stealing your ideas. If your ideas are any good, you have to push them through human throats. Howard Aiken .



Do you know what a huge gap lies between developing a great product and making it truly successful?
Those who start their own startup almost always have the same fallacy:
it is enough to realize something special and at the highest level, and the users themselves will come.
Unfortunately, this is not the case. For this to happen, it is necessary, at times, to make much more effort than for the realization of the product itself, very often bumping into a wall of incomprehension, and sometimes elementary stupidity:
')
“As soon as the Paris exhibition closes, the electric light will close with it, and no one will hear of it anymore.” Erasmus Wilson, professor at Oxford University, 1878.

Can this be avoided? Hardly. There will always be people who will not believe in your idea and in your project. But there will be even more people who know absolutely nothing about him. And your task is to fix it.

Under the cut, I will talk about how we solved this problem in Ivideon and what gave us an excellent result and what did not.

Search engine optimization or SEO

From the very beginning, we attracted SEO specialists to promote our site. And in general, completely in vain. And not because the experts were bad. We did not consider one simple thing. Nobody knows anything about us. Some analogs are absent and our potential audience is simply not looking for us.

Our goal is to create high-quality and affordable cloud video surveillance service. But not as a security system, although this is possible, but as a new, convenient tool for remote presence and monitoring. From one camera for the home, up to several thousand cameras for the network business with a large number of objects. And most importantly - all the cameras are available in a single personal account.

Remember the Blue Ocean strategy ? At that moment, when we became interested in SEO, we tried to enter the existing market of professional video surveillance solutions, which is a red ocean with many competitors and established leaders. The same market where the video surveillance system is associated exclusively with the security service, and not, for example, with managers checking remotely the quality of the layout of goods in the store.

So for us SEO didn't make sense. We needed to conquer the blue ocean without it.

Advertising

We checked the effectiveness of contextual and banner advertising. Yes, it gave us visitors, but the result from it was not unambiguous. Very often there is a false feeling that it is enough to “throw” money on Google Adwords or Yandex Direct and everything there will “automatically tune”. Creating an effective advertising company is very hard work, which is not done quickly and immediately. Not everyone understands this.
It requires the work of a good specialist who would understand the subject of online advertising and the services we provide would be competent, effective and most importantly - well motivated ... But how to find one?

As Walt Disney said, “you can invent, create, design and build the most beautiful place in the world, but you need people to turn it into reality . ”

How not to make a mistake in your choice, given the fact that we do not have the opportunity to hire 10 people at the same time at work and evaluate their result. And if you do this consistently, you can miss the time.

We found an excellent and generally well-known solution to this problem.

affiliate program

If used correctly, the affiliate program will become one of the most important tools for the development and promotion of your project. In our case, this is exactly what happened.
Among those people who, without exaggeration, can be called professionals, there are a lot of those who work exclusively for themselves. And not because it is better or worse than office work. In my opinion, it just gives a feeling of freedom and the fact that everything depends on you. This is sport, competition, drive, adrenaline. It is very difficult, but at the same time delays.
The partnership program allowed us to attract such people to the promotion of our project. And this is not one or two SEO-specialists working for a salary. These are dozens of people whose level of income depends only on themselves and on their outcome.
We just gave them the opportunity to earn with us.
For example, one of them owns their own promoted blogs or portals.
For them are created reviews, banners, promotions or other elements that allow visitors to these sites to learn about our service and go to our site. After that, if the incoming visitor makes a purchase in our store or replenishes the account of his personal account, the owner of the blog gets a percentage for this, significantly higher than the cost of rotating the usual banners.
Someone understands SEO and helps to bring targeted traffic to our site, also receiving a percentage of sales of equipment and services.
As a result, we get excellent specialists who help our promotion, and they, in turn, are motivated enough to work with us.
With all the desire we couldn’t have come up with as many stocks and New Year offers as were already implemented and sold by our partners.

Social functions

Social networks today are one of the strongest growth drivers for Internet projects. And in the case of Ivideon this was no exception.



First of all, we made all our applications completely free. By their capabilities, they are already approaching professional systems that cost more than one thousand dollars.
And secondly, from the very beginning we added to our service a free function of embedding a live video on your website or blog , and a function that allows you to simply share a link to a video , for example, on a Facebook or VKontakte wall.



Moreover, in order to motivate site owners to place a camera using the Ivideon service, we allowed them to embed not only a description of their own camera, but also place a link to their resource. Thus, if the camera is really interesting and users begin to share it with their friends, the camera owner will receive additional traffic to his site.
In the end, it gave its result. The number of clicks to our site from the built-in player located on a third-party resource has exceeded several times the traffic from search engines.

Summary

Just as there is no one pill for everything, there is no single recipe for promoting an Internet project. But you can say for sure that when creating a startup, it is extremely important to think over the promotion mechanism and try to build it at the very beginning.

Since our service is new and unique, it is much easier for them to interest the user than with a discount on the iron. Therefore, the affiliate program worked perfectly for us. We were able to concentrate on development and development, allowing our partners to engage in promotion and sales.

There are still many different options for promotion. One of them, for example, is holding various joint actions, contests, exhibitions. But we have not yet managed to get enough experience to tell about it. So wait for the continuation in the following articles.

I hope that this post will be useful to most of those who are planning to start or are already working on their own project. Try to take a fresh look at your plans and devote time to a promotion strategy. And then the probability of turning your project into a successful business will be much higher.
And do not listen to those who doubt your success. In 1965, Fred Smith gave a top three for a semester work in economics. And he, using the concept described in this work, built his own company, which today is known as Federal Express.